Stephen Chan: Religion and World Politics part 8, Christian reli­gion as fun­da­men­tal­ism and as spec­ta­cle.

One of the key dif­fer­ences between Islamic scrip­ture and Christian scrip­ture is that Islamic scrip­ture (the Koran) was meant to have been revealed to the prophet Muhammad dur­ing his adult life­time. It was not meant to have been revealed to a num­ber of peo­ple over many thou­sands of years. The Christian Bible, both the Old and the New Testament, has a his­to­ry of nar­ra­tion, of re‐narration, of revi­sion­ism, that spans a very great deal of time, pur­port­ed­ly from the time of the exo­dus from Egypt around about about the 1200s BC, right through to the years after Christ.

So, com­ing up to a com­plet­ed book over a peri­od of about one and a half thou­sand years and writ­ten by many dif­fer­ent authors, even though the exact author­ship of many of the books of the Bible is con­test­ed, what you have is suf­fi­cient vari­a­tion with­in this cor­pus of holy text to allow con­tes­ta­tion, to encour­age inter­pre­ta­tion, to allow for all kinds of dif­fer­ent either spir­i­tu­al or mate­r­i­al emphases to be giv­en to dif­fer­ent parts of the Bible. And parts are com­pared with oth­ers to try to find some kind of con­sis­ten­cy, even if they were writ­ten in very very dif­fer­ent coun­tries, in very very dif­fer­ent time zones, and for very dif­fer­ent pur­pos­es. A very great deal of the Old Testament, in fact, is prob­a­bly not as old as Moses but comes from the days of Ezra, and was part of the nation‐building of Israel after the release from Babylon, because of the Persian con­quest of the Babylonian world empire.

There’s a great deal of con­tes­ta­tion over whether or not the four gospels we have, not all of which tell exact­ly the same sto­ry, are the only gospels. The so‐called Gnostic Gospels, the hid­den gospels, the ones pro­scribed by church coun­cils, those are now once again in cir­cu­la­tion and they tell very very dif­fer­ent accounts of the sto­ry of Jesus. In fact, there’s no his­tor­i­cal record of Jesus ever hav­ing exist­ed until the tes­ti­mo­ny very briefly of Josephus Flavius in the year 70AD.

So the whole idea of being able to ascribe authen­tic­i­ty has all kinds of prob­lems of con­tra­dic­tion in the holy books that have been received by the church. And in terms of how these holy book stack up not only against each oth­er but against his­to­ry as we under­stand it as a sec­u­lar record and nar­ra­tion of what hap­pened in the old days of Israel.

Now, hav­ing said all of that, what you have in the Bible is some­thing which is open to inter­pre­ta­tion. It’s open to inter­pre­ta­tion in curi­ous ways. There’s a cer­tain received wis­dom about scrip­ture, not all of which actu­al­ly is scriptur­al. So that all kinds of sto­ries about Ham, one of the sons of Noah, hav­ing been shamed by laugh­ing at the drunk­en father who was lord­ing about with­out his clothes on. Afrikaner church­es in South Africa used that sto­ry to say that the descen­dants of Ham, who was cursed because of laugh­ing at his father’s naked­ness, and his descen­dants became the black peo­ple of Africa. In fact there’s absolute­ly no scrip­tur­al ref­er­ence what­so­ev­er to the col­or of Ham or the col­or of Ham’s descen­dants.

But all through his­to­ry there has been the tak­ing of var­i­ous impuls­es from the Bible to try to serve the pur­pos­es of polit­i­cal and social orga­ni­za­tion and social and polit­i­cal impuls­es. But in the Old Testament, for instance, there are all kinds of things that are lack­ing that we see today in the Christian faith. There was no Devil crea­ture in the sense of a scaly medieval beast who was thrown out of Heaven. In fact in the book of Job when Satan con­fronts God in Heaven, he is depict­ed as a resplen­dent angel able to talk on equal terms with God, able to come and go, and able to launch wagers against God with human­i­ty (in this case Job) as the bar­gain­ing chip.

The whole pic­ture that is paint­ed from Hebrew sto­ries, Hebrew leg­ends, Hebrew mytholo­gies, of the spir­i­tu­al world is in con­tradis­tinc­tion to what came at a lat­er point in the Christian era. No Heaven for human­i­ty after death. No Hell, in the received sense of a pun­ish­ment zone. And all kinds of things that were lat­er added on as civ­i­liza­tions devel­oped, as they inter­act­ed, as they inter­mixed.

So a very very great deal of Zoroastrian thought entered into the Christian church dur­ing the Roman peri­od. And the sep­a­ra­tion of fig­ures that were arche­types of light and of dark­ness began to take root at this point in time, and Satan was giv­en his tru­ly demon­ic char­ac­ter because of such influ­ences. These influ­ences allowed the depic­tion of Satan and his followers—his demons—in dif­fer­ent ways over the years. So in medieval times Satan and his ​“demon­ic” fol­low­ers were like lizards. In 1800s, Satan and his fol­low­ers were Chinese. They rep­re­sent­ed the Yellow Peril. If you go to Jean‐Paul Sartre’s old café Les Deux Magots on the Boulevard Saint‐Germain, you will still see there carved stat­ues of the two archde­mon lieu­tenants of Satan, Gog and Magog, depict­ed as Chinese.

So that the idea of using scrip­ture to label, describe, depict, and demean one’s ene­my makes of scrip­ture some­thing that was polit­i­cal. And the more spec­tac­u­lar the depic­tion, the more it seems to emanate from an inter­pre­ta­tion of scrip­ture which relies on spec­ta­cle. The idea of new scrip­tures that derive from a Christian foun­da­tion but which take it into rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent are­nas, such as the Book of Mormon for instance, depends on the spec­ta­cle of enact­ment of God’s will among cho­sen peo­ples of God in the Americas. It’s almost a repli­ca of the spec­ta­cle of the chil­dren of Israel try­ing to build a nation­al des­ti­na­tion for them­selves in what is now the Middle East. So all of these things become uses, and habits, and then con­vic­tions, and then arti­cles of faith.

What we have at this moment in time as we speak is the appoint­ment, by Donald Trump the new pres­i­dent of the United States, of a cre­ation­ist as Secretary of Education. And what you have here is the addi­tion of a very prim­i­tive tech­nol­o­gy to the idea of spec­ta­cle so that it’s not just a case of say­ing that there is intel­li­gent design but that this intel­li­gent design was lit­er­al­ly con­densed into a very short peri­od of time. It didn’t take place over mil­lions of years. It wasn’t a direct­ed evolution—not even a divinely‐directed evo­lu­tion, for instance.

But the time giv­en to the cre­ation not only of the plan­et but of the uni­verse is sev­en days, with each day cal­cu­lat­ed as 7,000 years. Nowhere in the Bible is there a ref­er­ence to a God’s day last­ing 7,000 years. This was entire­ly an inven­tion of a Bishop Ussher in the 1700s, who tak­ing into account what was known of his­tor­i­cal peri­ods at that point in time decid­ed that if this was the day of God’s rest and mankind had been in a civ­i­lized state for some­thing like over 6,000 years, there was there­fore a count­down pos­si­ble to the end of days before the com­ing of Christ at the end of 7,000 years—it was a prospect which was immi­nent but not yet on the hori­zon of Bishop Ussher’s day. Working back­wards, each day was there­fore 7,000 years.

So the total time of cre­ation of the sun, moon, stars, and Earth, ani­mals, human­i­ty, the whole lot then God’s day of rest in which mankind sinned and had to be redeemed, was con­densed into this cre­ative cre­ationist peri­od which defies all kinds of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge and sci­en­tif­ic cal­cu­la­tion. A sim­ple arith­metic, a sim­ple reverse engi­neer­ing, is then applied to a lit­er­al­ism which depends on spec­ta­cle and a spec­ta­cle which depends on the forces of dark­ness, the forces of light, oppo­si­tion­al char­ac­ter­is­tics in which the forces of dark­ness can be clothed in all kinds of polit­i­cal col­ors and all kinds of polit­i­cal pur­pos­es.

The use of scrip­ture as a nation­al­ism, the use of scrip­ture as an expan­sion­ism, the use of scrip­ture to jus­ti­fy a colo­nial­ism, all of these things are part and par­cel of the mod­ern Christian faith, the mod­ern Christian church. And what is miss­ing from it is per­haps one of the great­est aspects of the gospel accounts of Christ. And this is com­mon to both the accept­ed gospels and the so‐called hid­den Gnostic Gospels. And that is the idea of Christ as a mes­sen­ger of com­pas­sion.

Great the­olo­gians such as Thomas Merton pon­dered about the spir­i­tu­al qual­i­ties of mer­cy. In this way there’s a very strong res­o­nance between the Christological image and the Buddhist image of com­pas­sion and care for one’s fel­low human beings. But in today’s usage of Christianity, the uses of Christianity may from time to time be for com­pas­sion. They may be for lib­er­a­tion. But they can also be used in a spec­tac­u­lar way to jus­ti­fy oppres­sion.